StarWars.com: What did you think of Leia when you first saw her in the original Star Wars?
Mark Waid: Oh, I loved her from the start because she was so unlike a lot of women in film of the day. She wasn’t a damsel in distress, she wasn’t a princess to be rescued from an ivory tower. That was the setup, and yet the payoff is, once you get her onscreen and she’s active in the story, she’s a badass. She’s the one teaching the boys how to use their toys. That was so unique at the time, and sadly, it’s still a little unique. So, that to me is the appeal of really being able to get in there and show what I love about that character and why there are things about that character that are still unique, in terms of her tone, in terms of the way she commands the story, in terms of her connection to the other characters.
StarWars.com: I asked this to both Jason Aaron and Kieron Gillen: how excited are you?
Mark Waid: I’m over the moon. I mean, I’m really very excited. Over the Marvel and DC universes, I’ve pretty much methodically made my way through all the iconic characters, so it’s really cool to have a whole new vista opened up for me.
StarWars.com: That’s one thing I wanted to talk about. You’ve had a career where you’ve been able to write all of Marvel and DC’s icons and make your mark on them. Do you see this as a challenge for you to step into this new universe?
Mark Waid: The thing is, after spending a career working on iconic characters, I look at it more as an opportunity than a challenge. I enjoy working in other people’s universes. I enjoy having parameters built out for you in terms of what the world is, and then my job becomes finding some sort of personal touchstone or emotional connection to one or more these characters that allows me to tell a story I want to tell. The important thing is being able to get in there, get your hands dirty with these characters, and really sort of take them apart and know what it’s like to be them, to feel like them, to know what they want and what they’re after.
That’s the great thing about these particular characters. They’re so beautifully defined, even given the fact that, really, how much screen time has each of them really had? Not a whole lot, and yet you feel like you know them as well as you know members of your family.
StarWars.com: So I know you can’t say much, but what can you tell us about your series?
Mark Waid: Basically, the nugget of the idea I seized on is — once the Death Star is defeated, once all the adrenaline dies down, once all the medals are given out and Leia gets a chance to take a half step back — the emotional impact of losing absolutely everything you know, everything about your culture, everything about your family, all in one fell swoop. That’s something we just don’t have the time to deal with in Episode IV and V. That, I find really captivating, because that’s got to be the lowest moment in her entire life and a character is really defined by how they react in the lowest moment of their life. In this case, she has to actively choose: Will I be princess of nothing, and sort of just ride along in the Rebel Alliance and subsume myself to them, or is there a responsibility that comes with the title of Princess even though there are no subjects or royal house anymore.
It doesn’t take but two minutes of screen time to pretty much demonstrate to you that Leia is clearly one of those people who was born 20 years old. You know? That she clearly had and still has a very strong sense of responsibility. It’s so obvious from everything she says and does. So, our story is about Leia not long after the end of Episode IV deciding, “Well, as the princess, there are still responsibilities that fall to me, like making contact with any stray Alderaanians out there who may not know what happened. It is my job as princess to deliver the bad news. It is my job to bring those who survived by being in other places, together. It is my job to help preserve some sort of cultural heritage of my people, so that everything my planet stood for and everything my people stood for doesn’t get forgotten.” So it’s a five-issue story [arc] that takes her across the galaxy in search of others of her kind to try and pull them together. Of course, some of them are going to be suspect, because they suspect this could be some sort of weird trap by the Empire. Some of them are going to be very angry, as they rightly or wrongly blame the house of Organa for what happened. Obviously, Leia will be traveling as low profile as she possibly can. If and when the Empire gets wind of the fact that Leia is doing is this, they’re going to be very interested themselves in what she’s doing, what she thinks she’s doing, and what information there is to be mined from these people.
StarWars.com: Right from the start in A New Hope, she’s set up as a major thorn in the side of the Empire. And they know she’s alive after the destruction of the Death Star.
Mark Waid: Exactly. My educated guess is that even though they know she’s alive, the last thing in the world that the Rebel Alliance needs is for her to be caught anywhere else but in the heart of the Rebel Alliance. So that will also not go down terribly well. When she decides that this is going to be her mission, there’s going to be a lot of resistance just from her own allies.
StarWars.com: What’s also very cool is that you’ll get to write a version of Leia that is especially fun in terms of her relationship with Han at the time.
Mark Waid: Yeah, exactly. Yes! All the relationships are up in the air at that moment. They don’t know the things we know, and that makes all the characters in their various sides of the triangle entertaining as hell to write.
StarWars.com: Obviously when you’re writing characters like Superman and Daredevil and everybody else, you’re writing stories in continuity that count. But this is really the first time for Star Wars that comic book stories are going to be canonical, so it’s a pretty huge deal. How does that feel for you and what does it mean to you?
Mark Waid: That’s a huge responsibility, but again, it’s an honor. I just hope that I can do these characters that we love proud. But I certainly have every intention of doing that, because it’s not about me or what I type on the page. It’s about the characters.
The real fun part to me is helping give dimension to Leia. I think that she is often misunderstood as short-tempered or what have you, and I think that’s unfair. She’s direct. She’s not necessarily impatient, she’s just exasperated easily by people who are not as smart as her. She’s not bossy…well, okay, alright, she’s bossy. But she is a princess, after all, so you have to allow her a little bit of that.
StarWars.com: I mean, if she can stand toe-to-toe with and talk back to Darth Vader, I think you have to cut her some slack.
Mark Waid: Yeah, that’s just it. That’s the thing. Find me somebody else in that movie who stood toe-to-toe with him and mouthed off and lived to tell the tale.